Wounds Made Me
by wayward-river
Summary: It was then that her affection for him began to grow, to take up roots in the fire of her veins and the steel of her bones.


_I was wounded early,  
and early I learned  
that wounds made me._

—Adonis, from "Celebrating Childhood." (translated by Khaled Mattawa)

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"_You have seen much sadness in your journeys,"_ she had said to him, once, with the song of spring fresh around them, as the Inquisitor led them through the Hinterlands. She asked him what it is he believed in, and the answer he gave her was like poetry, soft and sad like the waning dusk, weakened her breath like a blacksmith's forge weakens iron.

It was then that her affection for him began to grow, to take up roots in the fire of her veins and the steel of her bones. She no longer gazed upon him and saw only his staff and pointed ears; she saw also a man weathered and bent by too many moons spent alone, who rose each morning anyway, who walked a path uprooted with stones and the winding limbs of solitude, and was the wiser for it. Cassandra knows she cannot say the same for herself.

They make camp on the banks of Lake Calenhad that evening, and she watches as he and Inquisitor Lavellan steal glances at one another from across the fire, and her lips quirk into a smile, the curve of a sickle moon. This will end in either victory or defeat, their names will either be sung in legend or lost to time, and she hopes, sweetly, that they'll find some measure of happiness before the curtain closes. As for herself….Cassandra shakes her head. It matters little, in the grand scheme of things. She is a single drop of rain in an ocean, and she's content with that.

And when she excuses herself to sleep, she unlaces the thoughts of him from her mind, unplucks the sound of his words from her ears. "_I have people, Seeker,_" he had told her, with no small measure of sorrow, "_the greatest triumphs and tragedies of this world has known can all be traced to people._"

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Weeks later, there is the loss of Wisdom.

Cassandra does not pretend to understand it, the bond he had shared with the Spirit, does not ponder on it for fear of the unknown. She can face hordes of Darkspawn and fearsome Dragons alike, but the Fade is a chasm that stretches wide before her, vast and empty. That he can so easily, so confidently walk its depths stirs up fear and admiration in equal parts in her breast. Whatever he and the Spirit had shared is gone, and the knowledge that, once again, he has lost something precious bitters her tongue.

That thought gives her pause. Her hand stills against the parchment laid out before her, quill perched uncertainly in her fingertips. She sets it down, leans back in her chair, breathes in the dust of her office. They – she – knows so little about him, the vaguest scraps of information he has given them. They add up to a story, yes, but an incomplete one at best.

Cassandra rises, the chair scraping against the floor. She exists the room, stalks across the parapets, the afternoon light cutting cleanly against her face. Cullen shouts at his men from down below. Somewhere, a dog barks, a man laughs. The mountains surrounding Skyhold bear blankets of freshly fallen snow, crisping the air with their coldness. She pushes open a side door leading to the library, where Dorian has made a nest of books in one corner, like a squirrel with a gathering of nuts. He would blanch at her comparison.

She leans over the railing, and knows his form instantly. Solas sits, cross-legged, before one of his frescos, busy applying a fresh coat of paint to the newest edition, depicting the Inquisitor's success in Halamshiral. Vivienne would call his skill amateur at best, but Cassandra can see the grace in it, the strokes of someone well-learned in color and line.

Cassandra's lips part on his name, but it dies a quiet death. Her fingers curl against the banister, leather gloves creaking. He continues painting, and even here she can see the smudges of it across his fingertips, striping blue and yellow and red against the fine bones of his hands.

She hasn't sought his company since his arrival at the Conclave, when she shackled him as a prisoner and questioned him mercilessly, her ruthlessness fueled by grief. What would he think of her now, to seek him alone again?

She sets her jaw, steels her will.

"Solas," she calls, the easy syllables of his name honeying her mouth.

He looks up, lips parted, brows raised. Darkness limns his eyes in sickly purple-blue.

"Seeker," he murmurs, and his eyes wander the space around her "Cassandra. What brings you here?"

She licks dry lips. "I wished to talk. Do you have a moment? I understand if you don't -"

He sets his painting tools down, rises in a swift motion of legs and hip. "Please," he loops his arms behind his back, a habit. "I do not mind."

She makes quick work of the stairs leading down, boots clipping against the stones. When she enters the rotunda, he has drawn up another chair for her to sit at. She takes it, nodding politely at him from across the table. It's scattered with all manner of notes, of books that have been opened and closed one too many times. The room smells like the freshly laid paint on the walls, and something sweet like perfume. She raises an eyebrow.

"Is that perfume I smell?"

He folds his hands demurely across the desk, but a tell-tale glint of a smile plays on his mouth. "Cologne of Dorian's, I imagine."

Cassandra snorts softly. "As eccentric as Dorian can be, I doubt his fondness for women's perfumes. But I will believe that, if you like."

The smile is gone. "I doubt you came here to talk of the latest Orlesian fashions, Seeker."

Her face grows suddenly hot. She fiddles with the hem of her sleeve. "No, but don't look so grim, Solas. I promise not to interrogate you this time. Or to shackle you."

That draws a look of surprise from him; it lifts his brow and brightens his eyes. "No? Nor to threaten to hang me should I not revive any unconscious Inquisitors-To-Be, I hope?"

Cassandra laughs, true and light. "Nor that. Actually," she looks away. "I came to talk. About you, if you don't mind. Gentler this time, that is."

All at once, a cloud passes over his face. "If this is about the Spirit, I would like to -"

"No," Cassandra interrupts, holding up one hand. "No, not about that. Other things."

That settles him, uncoils his tense shoulders. He breathes a sigh. "Very well. What do you wish to know that I have not already said?"

Her heart thuds harshly against her ribs. She looks away, tries to find words in anything but his face. "It occurred to me that the Inquisition…" She stops, looks to him again, shifts in her chair. "That I know so very little about you. I enjoy speaking with you, Solas. You're unlike any apostate – any mage – that I've met. It's true that we don't always see eye to eye, but I never expected you to agree with my views, nor I with yours."

He nods, the light catching the smoothness of his head. "Have you met many other apostates, Seeker? I assure you, I am quite average."

Cassandra chuckles, teeth peeking out from her smile. "That may be so, but my wish remains the same. The remarkable rarely call themselves such. You discredit yourself."

He shakes his head, in amusement or bafflement, she can't tell. "If you say so."

He unlaces his fingers then, and she's momentarily halted by their slenderness, the knobs of his knuckles, and imagines them stroking softly into her hair. She banishes the errant thought. It inspires a question, unbidden, spoken before she can consider them:

"Have you ever been married, Solas?"

The question surprises even her. For a moment, her eyes widen with the shock of her own boldness, her lips clamping shut.

He cants his head, a soft grin playing at the edges of his mouth. "I have not. I was always too busy picking fights and chasing skirts in my youth to consider the notion."

She actually laughs, so loud the crows above them shift nervously in their perches.

"You never! I can't see you chasing skirts, not even as a young man. You? You are far too reserved for that."

His smirk does terrible things to her stomach, wicked like a blade and just as keen. "I was many things, back then. Reserved was not one of them."

Cassandra raises a sculpted eyebrow. "I assume some of that remains, for you and the Inquisitor to be sweet on each other."

The light suddenly vanishes from his face, and when he speaks again, every note of his voice is heavy with something like midnight.

"The Inquisitor and I…have grown close, yes. I will not deny that. Perhaps we are not so adept at hiding it as we think."

Cassandra softens her face, unlocks her hands. "I should not have pried."

Solas frowns, makes a soft noise in his throat. "No, do not apologize. You came to ask questions, and I agreed to do so."

"All the same," she quashes the urge to lean in and lay her hands atop his, "You and the Inquisitor's involvement is none of my concern."

He only nods. "Is there anything else you'd like to ask?"

_Yes_, she wishes to say. _One question, and many more._

"No. That will be all for today. Thank you. I appreciate it."

She rises to leave, a touch to quickly for her liking, and turns swiftly to the stairwell, ascending two steps at a time. She reaches the last door, and then -

"You are welcome, Cassandra," Solas calls after her, and she dares to glance downward, catches his eye, and his smile is golden with warmth; it makes her think of sunlight, blinds her with its honesty.

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Later, she watches him return from Lavellan's bedchambers, with a lightness to his feet she has not seen in him, the kiss of love fresh on his lips. She lets herself feel happy for it.

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He speaks to her again, while she pens a report on the death of Lord Seeker Lucius. His blood still coats her armor.

She doesn't look up from her writing. "Solas. I did not expect to see you here. The tavern isn't somewhere I've seen you venture to often."

"No, I do not," he begins, slowly, as if speaking too quickly will physically wound her. "But only because you are not here often, either. I have heard of the other Seekers. Of what was done to them."

Her pen bites too harshly against the parchment as she scribbles onto it. "I see. Then you also know that I plan on rebuilding them myself? After all of this, I cannot stand by and let their lives go to waste. To stagnant."

He leans against the table, makes no move to sit. "You do not sound confident in that."

Her head snaps up, her whole face drawn into a grimace of anger. "Of course I do not! I am no leader. I will follow whomever cuts a path before me, into the Maker's arms if I must, but I cannot cut that path myself. I have no eye for the future, no tongue for diplomacy. I know only my sword and my shield, the things I can touch with my own hands."

Her jaw snaps shut. She looks away, down to her trembling hand, where the pen has torn a hole clean through the paper. She inhales a shuddering breath. "I am not prepared for this."

A moment passes by, punctured only by the sounds of people below, of shuffling chairs and soft murmurs.

"Look at me."

The sound of his voice, spoken so low and so softly, twists a knife into her belly. Still, Cassandra raises her head, her raven hair catching the last rays of twilight as it sinks below the mountains.

His face is kind and fierce, the blue of his gaze turned now a stormy gray, like clouds over the sea.

"You say that, but it is not true. You are brave and honorable, which is more than can be said of many. You will take the Seekers to great, new heights. Great things are rarely accomplished overnight."

She opens her mouth to speak, but he silences her with a stern look.

"It will not be easy. But as they say, the things worth doing rarely are."

Her throat closes with emotion. "I-" she starts, stops, jaw working uselessly against feelings she cannot bring to form. She sets the pen down, laces her fingers tightly in her lap. There is the familiar sting of sweet pain in her chest, stealing any words of thanks.

"You have the ears of all within the Inquisition, Cassandra. Including mine. I will be here should you need to speak again."

She watches his back as he disappears down the stairs and out the door.

It's only later that she realizes he never said for how long he would stay. So she snuffs it out as she would a candle, buries it deep, and watches him from afar, as his visits to Lavellan's quarters grow more frequent, longer, as he emerges ever brighter than before, as their glances linger with each passing day.

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The Inquisitor takes her to the Temple of Mythal. Though she wishes to rally against it, Lavellan preforms the rites of the elven gods, even as a storm brews in Cassandra's heart.

Solas watches Lavellan solve the riddles with a strangely intense expression, blue eyes glimmering beneath his furrowed brow. There is the ritual of Fen'Harel, and heat radiates from him in choking waves, a heat that neither Blackwall nor Morrigan can sense. Cassandra watches it all with a tense reservation, fingers itching in her gauntlets, stomach twisting. The heat is not anger, nor fear, but unabashed arousal of the basest nature, of pride that she cannot explain.

The Sentinels are next. The arousal turns to indignant rage as Lavellan pleads with him to sway them to her side, but they manage, barely, to avoid bloodshed. All the better; as they pass the ancient halls adorned with long-dead fables, Cassandra mutters an oath to the Maker and to Andraste, for she fears her doubts have sprung up as weeds in a garden at the sight of these ancients, who call themselves Elvhen and spit the word _shemlen_ at her feet.

They battle Samson; Cassandra tries to spare his life for the sake of information, but Lavellan will have none of it. She kills him swiftly, stares stonily as he gurgles on his last living breath.

The Well is next. It makes her skin shrink around her bones, raises every hair on her nape. Lavellan and Morrigan argue, but the decision is made. The Inquisitor will drink. Cassandra does not bother to protest, but Solas does. He bends to his knees before her, takes her hands in his and kisses them fiercely.

"Do not drink of it," he laments, and Cassandra has never heard him so full of despair. It breaks a piece of her heart to see him this way, a man so proud and passionate supplicating himself to a woman who will not listen. Not in cruelty, no, but in determination, for Lavellan's will is laced with both ice and fire, it burns as strongly as it freezes.

Lavellan drinks. Solas retreats to some corner behind her, though she dares not look him in the eye as he passes her in favor of shadows. When Lavellan falls, Solas is the first at her side, Cassandra second, his complexion bled of all color as he helps Lavellan to her feet.

More questions bubble up behind her lips; they have no time for it. Corypheus comes for them, a being of horrible wrath. They flee through the mirror, and only then does she allow herself a final breath, a final meeting of her eyes to his.

She dreams of it that night, the look on his face when he glanced up at her.

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It was not the look of a man given hope, but one of whole, utter defeat.

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When Lavellan returns without the tattoos, she feels the sad ending of something coming to a close, of a song silenced prematurely.

Though curious, Cassandra keeps it to herself. The wound is still fresh, the hurt still sharp, for Solas and Lavellan both, she knows, so she passes them in silence, speaks to them only when needed.

But the subject cannot be avoided forever; she catches Solas one night leaving the tavern, for he has avoided the rotunda much as of late. The light in his face is gone. She stops him just as he leaves.

"I'm sorry," she fumbles, because she can't think of anything else to say. The moon rises high above them, casting their shadows, long, stark, onto the dead grass at their feet.

"For what?" His voice is dry, worn and ragged, and oh, how deeply she wishes it was not.

"For…for you. For both of you. I should say – what I mean – it's none of my business. You both had your reasons, I am certain. But I am sorry either way."

Her fingers catch his wrist, cling delicately, unsure, the softest touch. "I know you loved her."

His head lifts toward her, the moonlight doing nothing to brighten his face.

"You are wrong," Solas says. "I still do."

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"'I regret to inform you'….no."

Cassandra scratches the sentence out, roughly, angrily, a slash of black ink.

"'Though our efforts were great, it seems Solas has left'…that's not right, either. Damn!"

She rips the paper in two, throws the remains over her shoulder, where they flutter uselessly to the floor. She sits in a hastily made office of her own, with mismatched furniture and ragged rugs. A fire burns low in the hearth.

It has been three weeks since the defeat of Corypheus. Skyhold remains mostly broken, intact only in the most vital of places. But they will rebuild, as all who have come before them. Skyhold, the Inquisition, and Thedas all. She will be certain of it.

She can rebuild it all if commanded; but writing a letter proves far more difficult.

For anyone else, she would be curt. To the point. Lavellan is not just anyone else.

Nor is the man she writes about.

Cassandra rests her head in her hands. The beginnings of a headache coil between her eyes. Her shoulders ache. Her stomach rumbles. She has slept and eaten little in the past few days, the challenge of this singular letter looming in her mind.

Where does she even begin? How?

After the battle, he had stood alone, the shattered remains of the orb in his hands. She glanced away for only a moment, but that moment was enough. He was gone when next she looked for him. They all looked for him. They found nothing, for he had left nothing, except his paintings in the rotunda, except Lavellan's bare face and sorrowful eyes.

Leliana was the first to look. She successful only in tracing his supposed childhood home, a pile of crumbling ruins. Even that had been a lie, and none of them had seen it, thought to question him further. He was so unassuming. They had all taken his words as truth – even her. Especially her.

"Some Seeker of Truth," Cassandra mutters, rakes a hand down her face. "Damn you. Bastard."

She says it, does not mean it, the oath lacking any venom. There is only the bitter bite of betrayal.

Someone approaches her from behind. Cassandra looks over one shoulder, to Leliana, who looks as tired as she.

"Still working on that letter, I see."

Cassandra huffs. "What is the point? She knows we cannot find him. He does not wish to be found."

Leliana comes to kneel beside her, one arm braced against the table. "I know. I only hope it's not something more dire. He may be dead."

She glares, teeth pulling back against her teeth. "You cannot know that. We would have found a body by now. Found _something._ Perhaps he is only more resourceful than we thought. After all, he so effortlessly fooled us all."

Leliana smooths her hand over Cassandra's arm. "I didn't mean to upset you. You're right. But do not speak of him so bitingly. Some of what he told us has to be true."

Despite herself, Cassandra feels her scowl soften. "I suppose," she sighs, bites her lip. "What in the Maker's name can he be planning? It's true the orb was of elven origin, but why mourn its loss so keenly?"

Leliana rises, crosses her arms. She is stern, shoulders back, eyes heavy-lidded. "I cannot begin to guess. For all we know, his name may not actually be Solas. But I do know you and he shared a bond. However unlikely," Leliana allows herself a chuckle. "I almost expected you to murder him as soon as he came to us. How strange, the things the Maker puts in our paths."

Cassandra closes her eyes, breathes deep. "Yes. How strange, indeed."

Rain begins to patter against the tiled rooftop. It's quiet, subtle, blue with the promise of thunder.

"Do you think he will return, Leliana?"

Leliana blunts the edge of her voice. "I do not know. Perhaps. He may even return as an enemy. Will you be able to face him like that? On the other side of things?"

The fire crackles, moans softly in the hearth.

"I will," Cassandra says. "Only because I must."


End file.
